Tag: a11y

My notes from Day 2 of the International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference (CSUN)

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Here are my notes for Day Two at the 2016 CSUN Conference. Please excuse any weird spelling, grammar, or formatting errors. Reference to pictures are unavailable within this post as I probably shouldn’t have taken them… but I can’t type as fast as people speak.

Accessible Maps

speaker: @accessibilityoz at gain@accessibility.com.au

Inform the user that there is a long description in the ALT text

“this is the Goal Coast Train line an dits X miles long”

“there’s a slight incline from the house that such and such built, and you turn left..”

Long descriptions are visible to everyone, so it can have additional info to the map itself

ALT should not have additional info

Developers: label pin markers that are useful “South Fitzroy” etc

Alternative: provide a list view of maps if you can’t alter the code

Keyboard/touch accessibility

“Zoom of zoom” can’t move anything but the map

Ensure all actions can be completed using mouse, touch keyboard etc

Google Maps you get are very keyboard accessible now (maps.google.com)

Press tab to see blue outline, keyboard accessible, see labels

When you embed Google Maps there are issues, third parties

Blue green colour blindness is common

Best practice: colours contrast with white or black and use borders, label sections of map (example: wards)

Juicy Studio Luminosity Colour Contrast Analyzer (new to me!)

Ensure users can increase the size of the map and map content (interactive maps online)

I love WordPress. Its intuitive, easy to use, beautiful, and free. Sadly, it is not known for it’s accessibility…

As I am not a web developer, I haven’t crafted my own blog out of HTML and CSS with love and joy. Instead, I have been writing ALT tags and hierarchy into my code to make it as accessible as possible. Recently, I started looking into plug-ins to increase the accessibility of my many WordPress blogs. To my surprise, plug-ins are only available to WordPress.org sites – which requires you to have a unique URL and web hosting. So, I created another blog, a travel site in reaction to the success of my China blog, through WordPress.org to utilize WordPress’ accessibility options.

Administer your new WordPress site by going to domain.com/wp-admin (if the entire site is WP) or domain.com/wpfolder/wp-admin (if WP is only part of the site).

Log into your unique URL (ie: http://yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin/) and enter password. (Troubleshooting note: If you get an Error 500 message like I did, contact your server provider and they can fix it for you. Once they’ve fixed it, clear your browser history and re-attempt to log-in.)